Talk:New England Complex Systems Institute

NECSI support for article improvement
Update: I have a new version of the article up in my sandbox. Please take a look and let me know if there are any changes we should make to have it be appropriate for a Wikipedia article. Thanks! Ckrfriedman (talk) 20:08, 29 April 2014 (UTC)

Update: Since I haven't heard any response to this in more than a week, I'm going to go forward and start working on the article itself. Let me know if there's a better way of working. Thanks! Ckrfriedman (talk) 15:03, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Hello, Wikipedians! My name is Casey Friedman, a researcher at NECSI. We'd like to work to make sure the Wikipedia article on NECSI is accurate and complete. It's important to us to respect the policy on Conflict of interest, so we will post text that we draft on this talk page instead of the article page. Help from other contributors who can review this material and post it when appropriate would be profoundly appreciated. We are also eager to offer links/references and information to contributors who are working on this page.

Please feel free to contact me at casey@necsi.edu or 617-547-4100.

Ckrfriedman (talk) 16:34, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

NECSI Faculty and Affiliates
We've cleaned up the listing of NECSI Co-Faculty on the website (http://www.necsi.edu/about/faculty.html), and I am going to remove the bracketed comment in this portion of the article if there's no objection. Thanks! Ckrfriedman (talk) 20:11, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Proposed text
I'm beginning with some small paragraphs below and a number of sources below. Ckrfriedman (talk) 16:50, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Post-crisis focus on social and economic systems
Since 2009, the Institute's research focus has shifted to socio-economic systems, with particular attention to the causes and consequences of the 2008 financial crisis and dynamics of Twitter networks and social sentiment. Policy relevant articles on stock market regulation and market crashes [1,2,3,4], food riots and the causes of high food prices [4,5], the European bond crisis [8] have been released straight to the press. Peer reviewed articles continue to appear on other subjects [9,10,11].

Press coverage
NECSI's work on the global food crisis has been widely cited by the press [12,13,14], by movements to curb financial speculation [15,16] and included among the top 10 discoveries in science in 2011 by Wired [17]. NECSI's scientific visualizations have received multiple citations on top 10 lists [18,19,20]

Spammers?
I work in a physics department and have gotten quite a number of bulk emails from NECSI. These seem to be borderline spam, for example the most recent one announces a publication in Science:

"We are pleased to announce the publication of a paper in Science on September 14, 2007:

Global Pattern Formation and Ethnic/Cultural Violence by May Lim, Richard Metzler and Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute

Abstract: We identify a process of global pattern formation that causes regions to differentiate by culture. Violence arises at boundaries between regions that are not sufficiently well defined. We model cultural differentiation as a separation of groups whose members prefer similar neighbors with a characteristic group size at which violence occurs. Application of this model to the area of the former Yugoslavia and to India accurately predicts the locations of reported conflict. This model also points to imposed mixing or boundary clarification as mechanisms for promoting peace."

I would write them off as just another source of crackpot/spam-conference academic spam, except that this recent publication is in the most prestigious academic journal in the country! It seems pretty shocking to me that a productive academic institute would send out spam... there are a couple other mentions of them spamming on Wikipedia in the talk pages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Spam/2006_Archive_Jul#65.96.127.125

What do others think? Are NECSI spammers? M OXFYRE ( contrib ) 21:19, 14 September 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I no nothing about those spam. But I looked at the articles related to the New England Complex Systems Institute in Wikipedia and I did some checking. It seems to be that this institute is as notable as it claims to be. It has an impressive faculty, with more notable people. And the publications you can find at the website are also quiet impressive. The institute itselve seems to be mentioned some 33 or 45 times in the Wikipedia but also here on notable places with respectable sources. This is my first impression. - Mdd 22:17, 14 September 2007 (UTC)


 * NECSI follows the practice common in academic circles of announcing conferences and other activities within the academic community to lists that are meticulously maintained --- anyone who requests removal from the list is promptly removed. If you would like to be removed, there is an automated procedure for doing so indicated in the header of every message, and you can also reply to any message with your desire to be removed. This may not be an ideal solution, but our lists predate the tremendous growth in spam in recent years. I personally take care of the lists and you can contact me directly by phone or e-mail: greg@necsi.org / 617-547-4100.


 * Of course, anyone who wants to be added to our mailing list of complex systems research related announcements can contact me or send a message to complex-announcements-on@necsi.org


 * All best,
 * Greg
 * Greg necsi 15:54, 20 September 2007 (UTC)

Notability
I think there is hardly any reason to question the notability of the New England Complex Systems Institute. Several notable persons are affiliated with this institute, and it is mentioned in over 250 books. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 23:25, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

Faculty and Co-Faculty
Some of the faculty members listed on this page are not listed as faculty members on their own page. JoshuSasori (talk) 04:20, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

EG Terrence Deacon, Charles Cantor. JoshuSasori (talk) 04:22, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Self-promotion
This page appears to have all the hallmarks of having been created and maintained by the owner(s) of the organization concerned. It reads like a promotional piece and virtually all the links are to pages on their own site or publications by their own staff/faculty. -- Hux (talk) 04:44, 7 September 2021 (UTC)